


i got scared in the middle of the night (something ain’t right in my head)

by badacts



Category: Raven Cycle - Maggie Stiefvater
Genre: Being Mean To People To Make Them Feel Better, F/M, Hurt/Comfort, Insomnia, M/M, Minor Injuries, bed sharing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-11
Updated: 2016-02-11
Packaged: 2018-05-19 16:12:27
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,589
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5973727
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/badacts/pseuds/badacts
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It’s really difficult to love people when they’re good sleepers and you’re a habitual insomniac.  Or, five times Ronan Lynch struggled with sleep.</p>
            </blockquote>





	i got scared in the middle of the night (something ain’t right in my head)

**Author's Note:**

> What better to do when you can't sleep than write vaguely nonsensical words about insomnia, okay. 
> 
> This is in no particular order except for that 2 does follow 3, and clearly Gansey is not dead (yet).
> 
> The title is from Love Will Call by the NZ group Nomad, which is worth a listen because it's awesome.

5 _(stay with me)_

 

Ronan has been asleep for a glorious twenty-five minutes when Adam, as quiet as a mouse, creeps into bed and wakes him up completely.

            Used to it, he doesn’t move until enough time has elapsed that Adam is breathing deep and slow, curled up far enough from Ronan that he isn’t touching him. He’s so careful to not wake Ronan, which is the worst part, and why Ronan is utterly sure that he can’t let Adam know that he wakes up in spite of that. Ronan doesn’t want Adam lying awake with him, not when he needs the sleep so desperately after his long shifts and longer hours of study. He also doesn’t want to be the reason that Adam suggests they sleep apart again.

            The balance of _Adam-and-Ronan_ , so hard fought, is a fragile thing. Ronan, who isn’t afraid of anything, is afraid of the ease with which it could all crumble.

            Chainsaw, who has a sixth sense for when Ronan is awake, rustles softly in her corner. He hushes her without moving at all. He could probably turn cartwheels across the bedroom without waking Adam but he isn’t willing to test that.

            Being stuck awake for hours in the dark of night with nothing to distract him from himself has always been a danger for him. It’s too easy to slip into slumber hating himself, for a start. Thankfully Adam’s sleeping presence is as much a balm as his waking one, his steadying breathing and the flutter of his eyelashes when he rolls over without waking. He does the same thing nearly every night – once he’s deeply asleep, he’ll roll subconsciously toward the heat of Ronan and press a limb or two or his whole body against him.

            Ronan doesn’t have the words to describe how he feels about that.

            The way it allows him to spend time looking at Adam without Adam looking back – no feigned disinterest required, not that that’s them now anyway – is something equally indescribable. Courage might have won Ronan the right to look, but he’s a little afraid of what his face might tell Adam before his mouth is brave enough to follow through.

            _Brave enough_ isn’t a familiar feeling for Ronan, but he’s getting there. _Brave enough_ is a soft but gutsy thing, without the connotations of _fearless_ or _reckless._ Ronan has always been both of those, but he’s pretty sure he can be brave enough for this, too.

            Adam heaves a gusty sigh, eyelashes fluttering once and his arm stretching until his curled fist bumps gently into Ronan’s breastbone. His face, devoid of the concerned wrinkle in his brow while he sleeps, is as peaceful as it gets. Ronan is weak with cyclical want and the realisation that he already has exactly what he wants – this, just this.

            Being awake for hours is a price he’s willing to pay for it.

            He puts on his headphones and plays soft music, content to commit the intricacies of Adam’s weird and wonderful face to memory until his eyelids get too heavy to stay open anymore.

 

4 _(hush)_

 

The problem with befriending a bunch of dreamers is that they can’t dream _quietly._

Ronan wakes from where he’s slumped on the couch, curled almost completely over the wide armrest with his head resting on his folded arms. There’s a heavy weight pressing him into it, the curve of someone’s skull resting softly between his shoulder blades. For a moment, he sleepily presumes it’s Adam, before he remembers that Adam is probably still at work right now.  Or, considering how late it probably is, at home in his own bed, which is marginally more comfortable than this couch.

            His legs are asleep under Gansey and Blue’s combined weight, Gansey leaning against Ronan and Blue asleep curled into Gansey’s chest. He lifts his head enough that he can turn and look at them over his shoulder. Blue is out cold, her mouth slack and hair getting even more wild in sleep. Gansey looks a little more restless, his eyelashes fluttering lightly against his cheeks. Ronan has lived with Gansey for a while now, so he has a feeling he knows what might have woken him.

            They had decided to watch a movie, one that has by now finished long ago enough that the TV has defaulted to a logo bouncing sedately across the screen in silence. It had been Blue’s choice, one that Ronan has seen before and enjoyed, though he would never admit to it as long as Blue claims to like it too. There is a kind of joy in being contrary when it comes to riling up someone just like him. Ronan had probably fallen asleep first – the last thing he remembers is Blue and Gansey whispering to each other, ear to mouth like little kids.

           At that moment Gansey says, in a tone that’s probably more usually reserved for lewd acts that require praise, “ _Glendower.”_

            Ronan can’t control the snort that he lets out, jolting Gansey abruptly out of his dream and into wakefulness. Blue starts at the same time with a sharp intake of breath, her eyes open but not quite awake.

            Gansey has been sleeping with his contacts in, so he has to blink painfully while he tries to remember exactly where he is right now. Ronan tries to accelerate this process by demanding, “Were you having a Welsh king sex dream?”

            Blue, quicker to wake that Gansey, laughs brightly as she sits up. “Oh my God, Ronan.” Gansey, however, sputters like he can’t even imagine – he probably can’t. Ronan has seen pictures of what Glendower looked like, and even swinging that way he can’t quite see it. Glendower is more a person to Gansey than he is to Ronan, who thinks of him more like an _event_ , but Gansey’s sex dreams are most likely Blue-related rather than sleeping-Welsh-king related.

            “Sacrilegious,” Blue says with a smirk, stretching her arms over her head.

            “Heresy,” Gansey manages to agree with a cough and a glare in Ronan’s direction. He sits up, making Ronan grunt a little as the blood flow abruptly returns to his feet. “Unlike you, I can’t control what I dream.”

            “I’m not sure if that’s denial or confirmation,” Blue says, low and a little wicked. “You two are both too useless to drive me home. I’ll share with Noah.”

            She’s halfway to his door before Ronan says, “Noah isn’t here. Is he?” The idea of Noah watching the three of them sleep on the coach is a little creepy, which is all Noah except that he’s usually more obvious in his creepiness.

            “He’s a boy. If I’m in his bed, he’ll be there,” she replies as she walks backwards through Noah’s door, a wink and a slam all the punctuation that that particular statement needs. Gansey’s mouth is parted, no response forthcoming even if it had been needed. Ronan uses one foot to push him off the couch, which does make him yelp.

            He and Gansey don’t talk about things like Blue and Adam anymore, because there’s an internal layer of awkwardness that comes from falling in love within a circle of friends as tightly knit as theirs. However, there’s an unspoken understanding that means the silence as Gansey levers Ronan off of the couch onto shaky pins-and-needles legs is warm and comfortable.

            “Go to bed,” Gansey tells him, his voice all affection as he scrubs a hand over Ronan’s head. He has to reach up to do it, but that somehow doesn’t diminish the feeling it gives Ronan.

            “Gonna be awake all night now,” he replies a little ruefully, because falling asleep at eight-thirty is a sure way to completely fuck his sleep schedule. However, he yawns about a second after he says that.

            “No,” Gansey says, definite as stone, walking over to his own bed and collapsing across it without bothering to climb under the sheets. Similarly, his actions don’t diminish the determination in his tone (his order, really), which is probably bred into him. “You’re going to sleep just fine.”

            He isn’t wrong, either. About ten minutes after Ronan gets into his own bed, he’s fast asleep.

 

3 _(don’t hold me against me)_

  

To say that Ronan and Adam stop fighting when they get together is true, to a point.

            Ronan, who hasn’t in too long been careful of how anyone feels, is suddenly cautious to the point of breaking. To say the truth is vital to him is no exaggeration, and he makes a liar of himself for Adam Parrish right up until he can’t anymore. Yes, he likes Adam – no, he can’t always like anyone, and he certainly can’t always be kind.

            He breaks everything in the end, bones to silence. The only question is how fixable those fractures can be.

            To snap and snarl is a relief of tension, but the feeling that fills him with its deflation is fear rather than more anger. Adam doesn’t like to fight but they have plenty of times before. Sometimes he backs down and sometimes he gives as good as gets, but the both of them are off balance with their new orbit and that makes them both vicious.

            The topic isn’t important – this is their first fight as something other than friends (and sometimes dubiously that), and they both refuse to back off in case that means something about either of them as individuals. At first, anyway.

            Ronan, a fire starter with a bladed tongue, is always the one who starts everything. It’s thematic then that Adam finishes things, and it’ll probably stay that way if Ronan is being honest, or maybe fatalistic.

            Adam, whose grip on his own temper can be tenuous, looks at Ronan for long enough that Ronan turns his expression from disappointment to anger to disgust in his own brain before he says, “I don’t want to fight with you, Lynch.”

            He doesn’t stay after that. That’s fair, because Ronan doesn’t want to stay with Ronan Lynch either.

            It’s late and they’d been planning on going to bed anyway, so that’s what Ronan does despite knowing it’s a bad idea. The Gansey-mandated therapist that Ronan had gone to once had suggested that he didn’t do anything in bed other than sleep to help with the insomnia. She had ample time to talk during their hour-long session, because Ronan had refused to say a word the entire time. There was literally no way to explain that he sometimes didn’t sleep because he couldn’t and sometimes because he was afraid of himself, because that was a really good way to get yourself committed again.

            Ronan hadn’t gone back, but that little bit of advice does come back to him as he tries to fall asleep and can’t, his mind as poisonous as his mouth. Every time he looks at the digital clock on his desk it’s fifteen minutes closer to sunup and he’s fifteen minutes closer to dying, probably.

            He can imagine Adam asleep in his own bed – he can’t imagine that even a fight would keep Adam awake, though that doesn’t make Ronan feel any better about lying unable to sleep in his bed. His skin is crawling with unfamiliar stress, almost too close to panic for him to recognise.

            Ronan Lynch and his fearless heart and cool head, outdone by a boy because that boy wouldn’t fight him, not because he would. He thinks there’s probably a joke in there somewhere.

            Ronan’s heart lives in a room over the church, still bruised and aching, and he shouldn’t have used Adam as a crutch so he could pretend that it wasn’t. He likes to forget sometimes that Adam only knows him in the inconvenient ways, and not many of the ways that really matter, at least right up until they do.

            Like always, lying in bed alone is a slow death to Ronan Lynch. He throws off the sheet, shoves his feet into shoes, and leaves.

He only says to Gansey, “I’m going,” on his way out.

 

2 _(don’t show me a mirror that I can’t bear to look in)_

 

Pride, a sin that Ronan is intimately acquainted with through exposure to Adam Parrish, keeps him from the church and sends him to 300 Fox Way instead.

            It’s after one in the morning and the house is dark but when he knocks against the door Blue is the one to answer. She’s wearing a singlet with no holes and leggings with many, her hair released from its many clips.

            “Gansey rang ahead,” she murmurs, peering up at him with a penetrating expression. He doesn’t say anything, though he’s thinking that Gansey clearly knows him far too well, and after a long moment of silence Blue steps aside and gestures him inside with a particularly Gansey-ish wave of her arm.

            “Upstairs,” she whispers, and then, “ _Shh_ ,” when he loudly hip-checks a bookshelf or a side table or a marble statuette of an obscure goddess in the dark hall. He’s never been upstairs or out of maybe two rooms on the bottom floor, which Blue realises in time to overtake him before he goes wrong. She grabs his hand on the way past, hers small and warm and dry and much stronger than he would have guessed, using it to tug him in the right direction.

            Her bedroom is very Blue, the bed rumpled like she’d gotten out of it to let him in. She probably had, or at least had for Gansey’s phone call.

            “Get in,” she says, indicating the bed with a no-nonsense nod. Ronan looks back at her, balking without actually saying anything. “If you’re wanting to talk to someone, I’ll wake Calla.”

            That’s more of a threat than an offer, and they both know it. Blue’s kind of comfort is the same as Ronan’s, which is to say, nearly non-existant except for how it kind of makes you feel better anyway.

            Ronan says, “Do you invite a lot of boys into your bed?” His voice is a little scratchy, worn out, without the cruelty that would make that question mean anything.

Blue gives him a very unimpressed look and says, “It’s _you_.” It manages to be both a positive – like she trusts him and his very dangerous subconscious – and vaguely offensive. She doesn’t bother to repeat herself, just points expressively at the bed with one finger. Her nail polish is the purple of passionfruit skins and bad bruising.

He takes off his trainers and does as she asks, obedient when she prods him up against the wall and climbs in after him. When she switches off the lamp, the window with its undrawn curtains throws bright moonlight across the two of them.

“Are you going to dream something that will eat me?” she asks, which is – not helpful. Ronan rolls his eyes, and she punches him in the shoulder in response hard enough to make him squawk.

“No!” he protests in a whisper-shout.

“Good,” she replies decisively, the duvet pulled up to her chin and her eyes fixed on him like she can see right through him. “You’re warm.”

With that, she closes her eyes and, for all intents and purposes, immediately falls asleep.

Ronan manages a sigh. The weight of her body, though lighter than what he’s used to, is a comfort, and she’s so warm her small body feels like it’s radiating heat. Also, her no-nonsense approach and lack of questions for him are a comfort. Gansey can’t provide that, because he cares too much – while Blue arguably cares just as much, her casual dismissal of any drama learned from a lifetime of living with a houseful of psychics is a useful skill to have.

Blue Sargent isn’t a comfort, except for all the ways she is. Ronan, to whom kindness is mostly a lie and not any kind of solace, can recognise in himself the need for acceptance without sweet words marring it. That’s why he came, and why he stayed, and why after a while of circular thoughts and listening to Blue’s steady in-and-out breathing he falls asleep and doesn’t dream.

 

1 ( _hold my hand when I can’t sleep)_

 

Ronan wakes suddenly but without the capacity to flinch or yell, locked into his body and his racing heart. He’s in pain, unable to tell whether it’s leftover from the dream or a more current sort, straining every muscle he has control over for sound. He barely breathes for a long moment until he registers that all is still silent, at which point a gasp wrings itself out of his spasming throat.

            There’s sudden skittering movement right next to him in his bed, and this time he nearly does scream.

            “Ronan?” Adam says, thick-voiced as he sits up and reaches across for the light by the bed. Ronan loses his sight to it when it goes on, star-shattered through his watering eyes.

            Adam says, “Shit!” His tone of blank surprise is only comforting in that it isn’t the abject terror that would have come if the light had illuminated one of his terrors.

            “Ronan, breathe,” he says, and his hand comes down as heavy as stone on the rapidly moving cage of Ronan’s ribs. He’s hyperventilating, probably – his breath is nearly as loud as his heart in his ears. Conversely, the weight on his chest is a comfort; he hiccups and manages a deeper breath, his right hand rising to lock onto Adam’s wrist with the fiercest grip he can manage.

            “You’re safe,” Adam says, which is a lie, but one that Ronan can forgive as long as he doesn’t let go. “Easy, easy.”

            It’s such an Adam-type thing to say – Henrietta to the core, like he’s calming a horse or an aggressive dog – that Ronan grates out a laugh. Adam blinks at that but doesn’t comment.

            “Just stay still,” he cautions, his other hand coming down on top of Ronan’s where he’s gripping Adam’s wrist. “You’ve got a cut here, stay still and let me look at it.”

            Ronan is getting smarter, getting braver, so he hasn’t worn the marks of his own mind turning on him for a while now. To look down to see the bright slash of blood on his own skin and Adam’s hands is both a horror and a deep disappointment that his control still isn’t what it could be. Ronan controls dreams, a king, but he can’t always master his own mind when he feels the familiar bite of grief.

            Anniversaries are a bitch. Ronan should have known to expect this, considering the date.

            “It’s not bad,” Adam reports calmly. “Won’t need stitches. Can you sit up?”

            He doesn’t wait for Ronan’s yes or no, levering him up easily to sit. Ronan crosses his legs under the covers and leans forward over them, pulling his arm towards him where Adam is still holding him. He has a single cut curving against the outside of his wrist and over the top side of his lower arm, only a few inches long and already starting to clot. Unlike the others, it probably won’t scar.

            “One second,” Adam says, pressing Ronan’s arm against his chest so it stays above his heart before he climbs off the bed. He goes into the bathroom and returns with clean hands and a damp cloth.

            “Here,” he says, easy, and wipes the blood off of Ronan’s skin like it doesn’t even bother him. It stings in the cut, though Adam is careful not to disturb the scabbing that’s already forming. Once done, he takes the cloth back and gets rid of it, and then returns to dress the cut with quick no-nonsense fingers while he sits cross-legged over the covers and knee to knee with Ronan. Besides a little spotting on Ronan’s shirt, the blood had mostly stayed on his skin, so he pulls it one handed over his head. When it snags on his other wrist Adam frees him, tossing it off one side of the bed.

            They look at each other for a long moment after that, both of them a little guarded. This isn’t the first time Ronan has woken Adam with a nightmare, and he’s had plenty more that Adam didn’t wake up for, but it’s the first that has ever drawn blood. Ronan is braced for the questions, waiting to feel them like fists that he can’t fight off.

            Adam asks, “Wanna drink?” Now the adrenaline is fading he already looks sleepy again, his accent stretching the phrase out. It’s four in the morning and the both of them should be turning the lights out again so that Adam at least can sleep.

            “No, just-” Ronan says after a moment, grabbing Adam’s collar – loosely, but with intent – and leaning back so that Adam sprawls across him when his head thumps into the pillow. It’s awkward, which means it’s very _Adam-and-Ronan_ , but Adam doesn’t bother to protest. He reaches to the side and flicks the lamp back off without moving the rest of his body except to turn his head so that he isn’t being smothered in Ronan’s chest.

            Once the darkness has enclosed them, Ronan curves his good arm over Adam’s back and tucks his palm against the arch of one sharp shoulder blade. In answer Adam worms his own hands under Ronan, stroking gently up and down his sides.

            “You’re fine,” Adam says, so quietly as to be nearly silent, his lips moving against the swoop of Ronan’s throat where it meets his collarbone. “You’re just fine.”

 

 


End file.
